Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The Other Poems

Speaking of the future of American poetry (I can begin with this prepositional statement, because it is always what one was previously speaking of, if only metaphorically), in the near future of it, this new Fence book will be out.

I've made the obligatory Book Trailer, and so I present it to you herewith:

Timothy Donnelly writes:

With The Other PoemsPaul Legault has produced a brilliant sonnet sequence that calls to mind the dizzying cinema of Busby Berkeley as much as it does the inexhaustibly inventive rhetorical contraptions of Shakespeare or Sidney. Rustling together a cast of hundreds as disparate as Sartre, Dolly Parton, The Little Chair under Water, Québec, Caliban, and Women with Unconventionally Long Hair, Legault has staged a spectacular form of existential sketch comedy that, for all its slapstick bleakness, proves surprisingly intent on “exploring joy and its intricacies.” Even as its characters drop such deflated zingers as “The duality of progress will deter us, / but from what exactly?” or else announce, with art-house taedium vitae, “I am going to watch a movie for a class. / Then I will eventually grow old and die,” the ultimate objective of The Other Poems is the pursuit of its own happiness—one cobbled together with extraordinary resourcefulness, spirit, ingenuity, and focus—and to show, by example, how we might each of us bask in the Klieg lights of our own devising.

You can do this*, if you want:

*Another this that you could do is ask for a free Advanced Reader's Copy [[from] fence.fencebooks@gmail.com]****Sometimes if someone does that he or she does something with it but doesn't have to.